Test and Measurement
Test & measurement innovations: a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the new Tektronix 5 Series MSO mixed signal oscilloscope
At first glance, it’s clear that the recently unveiled Tektronix 5 Series MSO mixed signal oscilloscope looks very different from other oscilloscopes in its class. For one, the screen takes up 85 per cent of the front panel compared to about 50 per cent on most scopes. Next, this is not just another oscilloscope, it is the number of analog inputs—up to eight—compared to the more typical four. As you power on the scope and connect it up your device for testing, you’ll see that this is something more than just a warmed-over version of last year’s scope. It’s a complete end-to-end redesign. Chris Godfrey, market development manager, Tektronix, tells us more
B
ased on extensive research into the changing needs of engineers working on modern technologies, it became
apparent to product planners at Tektronix that meeting these changing expectations would take more than an upgrade to its midrange oscilloscope, so the largest development effort in Tektronix’ 71-year history was launched. Throughout the development effort, no stone was left unturned. The 5 Series MSO features a new ASIC, a new lower-noise front-end amplifier, a new hardware architecture, a new software architecture and a new user interface. The scope incorporates a number of industry firsts, including reconfigurable scope inputs, models with six or eight analog input channels, a 15.6 inch capacitive touch display, a user interface natively designed for touch, and optional Windows operating system.
While it certainly would have been
interesting to have had a journalist embedded in the design team to write about “the soul of the new oscilloscope”, the next best alternative is to have conversations with key members of the design team to talk about the challenges they faced and how they overcame them. Here are just a few stories from Q&A interviews with leaders as well as designers and engineers from multiple disciplines across Tektronix.
What led to the decision to develop a completely new platform? Gary Waldo, product planner in the mainstream oscilloscopes group, said: My job is to work with engineering to figure out what our next generation products need to do. I represent the voice of the customer and the core team. There are new application needs coming along that we wanted to be able to meet that we couldn’t do with our current products and platforms. We knew that we needed to undertake a new platform to address these new sorts of capabilities, to modernise our products and provide the capabilities that customers are looking for today, and have it operate in a simple and intuitive fashion. Basically, to meet the spectrum of customer needs, it was necessary to develop a new platform.
Everything about this platform is brand
The TEK049 ASIC is the heart of the 5 Series oscilloscope. With 400 million transistors, it’s “a scope on a chip”.
36 July/August 2017
new, including the user interface. With many programs I’ve worked on in the past, the user interface has been an evolution of prior user interfaces. This is the first entirely new user interface in probably the 10- to 20-year timeframe, and we did it because we wanted to take the next step for our customers in terms of making the product just as simple, intuitive, and usable as possible. We know our customers are
Components in Electronics
FlexChannel inputs that can be either one analog or eight digital channels achieved the design goal of giving customers more flexibility in determining the right oscilloscope channel configuration for their needs
busy; we don’t want them worrying about having to learn or relearn the instrument every time they use it.
What can you tell us about the new ASIC?
Bart Mooyman-Beck, director of technology, answered: My team developed the chip that goes into the 5 Series MSO, a design we started about four years ago. We call the chip TEK049. It’s basically a scope on a chip. It has all the functions that are required for a scope—the ADC, the digital signal processing, the rasterisation, the display formatting—this is the heart of the design.
The design is a 400 million transistor design. That was a design that we had not ever done before here at Tektronix, and we weren’t able to do it entirely by ourselves. So we brought in partners and contracting companies to help. Managing that effort was a pretty significant challenge. We used resources around the planet, and we were going 24 hours a day, sometimes seven days a week. We were trying to leverage the entire infrastructure that we had available to us to deliver this product. We used a layering process for chip responsibility. The senior directors would make the contracts, make the high-level interactions with our partners and our suppliers. Then the engineers would run day-to-day activities with our partners, and everyone had to contribute at all levels to make this happen.
What’s the story behind FlexChannel inputs? Gary Waldo replied: The goal here was to give the customer flexibility. We provide up
to eight of these flex channel inputs. I can configure those as eight analog channels and zero digital channels, I can do seven analog channels and eight digital channels, I can do six analog channels and sixteen digital channels. You see the pattern here. With the traditional approach of an MSO being you either get sixteen digital channels or none, you were almost guaranteed to provide the wrong number of channels to the customer.
What’s your best experience from this project? Shane Arnold said: We have a milestone that we are working toward when we bring up a new system that has a long history here at Tektronix. We call the milestone the Green Worm, a reference to the old CRT based scopes, and when the traces on the screen were green. So, the first time that an instrument is able to digitise a waveform and put it up on the screen with the triggered waveform view, we call that the Green Worm. Even though it was my birthday, I was working in the lab late into the night and was there at the moment when the Green Worm happened for this product. That’s a memory that I’m really happy about.
Bridget Fisher said: I’m into user interface design because I like to make people happy. When people first come to the 5 Series MSO, they’re going to perhaps have an eyebrow raised because it’s something that they’ve not seen before, but within a matter of minutes, they’re going to have a smile on their face.
www.tek.com www.cieonline.co.uk
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